Reading: Sons and Lovers and Creative Vegetable Gardening

Moving: housework

Listening: Grateful Dead, when I'm upstairs

Watching: "Sense and Sensibility" and "Beyond the Clouds," the latter because it had John Malkovich and was co-directed by Wim Wenders but had to its advantage only a bunch of naked leggy French and Italian chicks.

29 December 2000: Housework

10:30

• Launder and iron new dining room curtains
• Do the rest of the laundry
• Retach buttons to sage housedress and lavender henley
• Put Yet Another coat of white on the heating vents
• Dust bedroom furniture with spandy dusting & polishing oil (another stocking stuffer from my spouse--romantic, eh?)
• Empty back landing to garage
• Return bedframe to coal room from garage
• Call Denver Recycles re large-item pick-up and cardboard drop-off sites
• Sweep and swab front stairs
• Mop television shrine floor
• Call Public Service and Denver Water re digging sites in front easement and along back fence
• Return stupid glass that doesn't fit front security door to garage
• Stake and measure vegetable garden site
• Ponder possible menu for Thursday lunch (We have a new staff member and for months CoolBoss has been jonesing to see the house. The table will be delivered Tuesday, so we can maybe all stand around it or something)
• Add pictures to Christmas page
• Walk over to SPM's house to feed the cats

I would be such a good housewife.

If, indeed, I got any of this stuff done.

1:30

• Launder and iron new dining room curtains

An hour, even spent in front of "Sense and Sensibility," ironing four panels 48"x84" panels. Of course, without Emma Thompson or at least something similar I wouldn't've spent ten minutes. But that's why I don't iron.

Meanwhile, RDC has been ripping out the windows from the living room. They have been painted shut, top and bottom. While opening the top halves would cool the house better than opening the bottom, fixing them seems like impossible, so we'll just have the bottoms. He might have to rebuild the frames entirely. The frame is split through at one point where probably the window was kicked out and the house broken into, wheee. The victim/previous owner nailed the sash into the frame and painted the whole thing shut. Which, as a security measure, fails in my estimation since hello, there's still glass in the middle.

A dealbreaker on this house would have been bars on the main level windows. The basement windows stand at shoulder height and get very little direct light, and we seldom open them and usually keep them covered with flimsy curtains. Eventually we'll get security bars for them. But not upstairs; I would feel like I'm in jail.

Yet to do tonight:

• Clean up desk
• Retach buttons to sage housedress and lavender henley
• Swab front stairs and television shrine floor

Tomorrow, in daylight

• Dust bedroom furniture
• Stake and measure vegetable garden site
• Ponder possible menu for Thursday lunch

Weekday:

• Call Denver Recycles re large-item pick-up and cardboard drop-off sites
• Call Public Service and Denver Water re digging sites in front easement and along back fence

Cards are still trickling in. Today I got one from CKC, who must really be a grown-up now to be sending cards on her own. She likes Cleveland. Old Lyme must be even more stifling than I remember, was my immediate and unkind reaction to that. I'm glad she's enjoying her new city.

My favorite card this year might be Dora's: "I'm going to gain 20 pounds." "I'm planning on two packs a day." "I'm going to drink myself right into an early grave," and on the inside, "Here's to New Year's resolutions we can keep."

Or it might be a photograph card from EKH, who must have been in a wedding with her daughter. TEHW looks so much like her mother it makes my heart skip but even more ethereal, in a floaty dress with flowers in her hair.

Or it might be the one from Nisou, who addressed hers to Feather-Butt and his Parents.

But I don't know what I'm going to do next year, when the newly painted wall won't appreciate tacks but the mantel will still be chockful of other Christmas paraphernalia. Or maybe I shouldn't have so much crap. I mean, plush figures of the Grinch's dog Max and the Spotted Elephant from the Island of Misfit Toys? Please.

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A reader pointed out I had left the e off Anne Tyler's first name and an i out of someone else's last name. Since I just copied the latter from a list on someone else's page, I am guilty more of lack of copy-editing than of careless misspelling, but I say, Anne Tyler I will always mess up. I don't think of putting an E on her Anne because of Anne Shirley. Ann without an E looks so much less hospitable that it suits Tyler better.